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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  May 20, 2012 10:00pm-11:00pm EDT

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they could give it to, for example, the ladies in white. they give it to groups and institutions now and then, these women who stick their necks out by holding candlelight vigils and so on and publicly praying for their loved ones in prison. it would be an awfully good thing, i think, if norwegian committee gave the prize to a cuban, but be i wouldn't wait up nights. >> host: well, we're out of time. >> guest: that was a pretty negative note to end on. >> host: do you want to throw out any last minute positive thought? >> guest: i think not. maybe end on a touch of gloom, but what a bright day it would be if the committee followed through on that. ..
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>> michael mann, lead author of the paper talks about his experiences being the subject of attacks by those you disagree with his conclusions. the hockey stick graphs was featured in the u.n. report on climate change.
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this is about 15 minutes. >> thanks for that kind introduction. it's really nice to be able to talk about the book a little with my friends at penn college state-owned university. i'm going to sack out with an excerpt from the book, and i'm not talk a little bit more about the book from them how i found myself at the center of one of the fiercest debates in society today to debate over climate change and what to do about it and start a what i've learned over that like to think i've learned and lessons i can share from unix. and that i've had at the center of the debate. so the excerpt that all read is my attempt to sort of take readers from the very beginning back to a particularly
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memorable, not in a good way, morning in my life and to use that to provide you some sort of a window into what it's like to be at the center of a fairly heated attack by those who find it convenient in some way, the scientific findings that it is real. so in the morning of november 17, 2009 i worked my my private e-mail correspondence with fellow scientists have been hacked from a research center at the universe be an selectively posted for all to see words and phrases cherry pick from the thousands of e-mail messages and remove from the original context and strung together in ways to malign me and my colleagues in research and soundbites intended to imply a propriety on our part were quickly disseminated over
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the internet and coordinated public relations campaign, groups affiliated with the fossil fuel industry and other climate change predicts how he'd someday i'm leading newspapers and onto television screens around the world is the cartoon video ridiculing mean and falsely accusing me of hiding the decline in local temperature was released on youtube and advertised for a sponsored link that appeared within a google search of my name. did he eventually made its way in the cbs nightly news. the issue at the hacked e-mails and numerous investigations were launched the artwork was subsequently vindicated time and again, the whole episode was a humiliating one unlike anything ever imagined happening. i don't climate change critics willing to do just about anything to try and credit, but was horrified now i would stoop
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to in my thoughts turn to an event from a decade earlier. in august 1999 and attended a meeting in tanzania to delete out there for the upcoming report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the ip cc from a hotel room to be one of the world's great wonders, not kilimanjaro with its msn icecaps lain just just decreasing the equator at the icecap at the end of the 20th century has shrunk just a third of the area covered in 1936 in earnest hemingway wrote, but it was majestic all the same. after the meeting i joined the daily expedition to see one of the world's great displays of nature. zebras, elephants, where buffalo, warthogs, cassels, ostriches wonder among the world list entries predators, lion, leopard and cheetahs. the most striking i saw that a record since the first inning
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back-to-back forming a continuous flow of vertical stripes. what a day do to us and eyepiece ec colleague asked me to work i? to confuse the lions. but for the most vulnerable on the edge of the herd. they have difficulty picking out an individual zebra to attack when in a seamlessly incorporated into the larger group. in this case in a continuous straight. only later would i understand the profound lesson that nature has to offer me and my fellow claimants in the air to come. so let me step back a little bit now and talk about my background . i have loved science in the earliest days i could remember. as a young boy always fascinated by anything vaguely scientific. i used to pester the adults with
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questions about the speed of light and tornadoes and hurricanes and just about anything subway related to the natural world and i love science. in high school i was one of those science geeks, science mary ann is literally true that my idea of a good time on a saturday night was hanging out with my other key crowns at school in the computer room working on interesting problems in trying to solve problems through a clever programming technique and having pizza. i was an idea of a fun saturday night. a little pathetic actually. interestingly enough there's a story i recounted my boat. back in 1984 after seeing the movie wargames. i suspect that if you have seen the movie. i became fascinated with this problem. in the movie they are trying to
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teach this computer to take a control of nuclear warheads, trying to teach futility of war so will launch these were. to do that they need to teach about utility and so they decide they need to play itself tictac show and learn from the mistakes that they don't understand that you can't win a game of tic-tac-toe and you can't win a global thermonuclear war. and that has profound locations for society and policy that has nothing to do with whatever centuries. it was a cool programming problem and how you teach the tic-tac-toe game to learn from its mistakes. most artificial intelligence. i set out to do this and spent a couple months that some are trying to solve this problem. i used a trick, a term that we used in science to denote sort
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of a clever approach to solving a vexing problem to get the computer to learn from its mistakes because it turns out there's so many different news that she record every bad move every time the computer loses you tell it not to make it way to the same position that it was then when it lost a game and in the process that will eventually learn to become undefeatable. but it turns out that there's so many different news that if you restore every configuration at least with the computers we had in the mid-1980s, the program gets so slow it's just not solvable. so the trick i used was to recognize the symmetry of the problem, the tic-tac-toe board looks the same with the rotate 90 degrees, 180 degrees, whether you flip it vertically or horizontally and so it turns out
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if you take into account the symmetry there's many fewer moves that you have to store. so the term track would be used later after these e-mails are hacks. one of the e-mails that was cherry picked and taken out of context referred to mike's nature trick and what it was describing was a way of preparing two different data that don't completely overlap so you can understand one in the context of the other. and yet that word was used prior to track errors and climate scientists are trying to trick the problem of climate change. and so, this is -- that is the nature of the attack but they've been subject to. so let me get back to my story. i went back to my college, and
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majored in physics, research and theoretical physics, condensed matter physics and understanding the behavior of fluids liquids and solids and lead us to graduate school at yale university study theoretical physics. this is the late 1980s now and it's actually pretty bad time to be giving it to physics as they just cut the team. congress had just cut funding for the supercollider so suddenly there was an the investment in physics that we were all expecting. you could no longer just work on any problem you wanted. you could necessarily work on the big picture problem. the sort of problem that it got me excited about going to physics in the first place was being funneled to his increasingly more plate areas of research. so i sort of decided to take a step back to see if there is some oral spray could apply my math and physics background to working on a big picture problem
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and i saw that there were her scientist on the hill from the physics department and the department of geology and geophysics who are you saying the disney to work on this amazing problem of understanding how the climate looks. i went down the house, talked to the individual to become a phd at eisner and did my pc research on climate. not climate change. i was actually interested in natural climate and natural oscillations and climate that might impact trends that we see. i listen actually working on the problems of climate change, i am looking at natural climate change is, we only have about 100 years of instrumental records. so if you really want to investigate longer-term behavior come you have to turn the recall proxy data, tree rings and i.c.e. cores, so my foray into using these proxy data to
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understand how the climate had changed was stricken by my interest in national climate. and yet we would eventually, once we figured out what these data were telling us, we were led to an inescapable conclusion what we found was to be some form income the worm in the past century did appear to be unprecedented in the context of at least the past thousand years based on the information of the proxy data also may lead us to publish what has come to be known as, unfortunately penn state bookstore was kind enough to lend me this for display purposes. if i today sticking to be known as the hockey tape. it's actually far more -- just what perfectly like a hockey stick. it's got erratic variations and
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there's a relatively warm. about a thousand years ago during the gleeful times descending into the cold centuries that the little ice age and then of course the blade of the hockey stick is the warming. what we found in our study is the recent worm he did indeed appear to be unprecedented as far back as week ago. a thousand years. >> the hockey stick by a colleague of mine and once it was featured in the all-important summary for policymakers of the report in 2001, the one part of the eyepiece ec report, which is really bad for policymakers and really does enter into the policy does focus on climate change. but it was featured in that report, it became an icon in climate change. i and my co-authors found ourselves really potentially accidental and quite reluctant public figures in this larger
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debate over human caused climate change. so you know, it was wise to become a lightning rod among those seeking to question the reality of climate change i think because it told with a relatively simple picture, you know, a story that there's something unusual taking place today and by inference, perhaps it has to do with what we are doing and burning fossil fuels and elevating greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. he did need to understand the mathematics of how the theoretical climate model works to understand that picture and understand what i was telling you. i think it became a threat to those again who website to discredit climate change because of our need to perhaps shift
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their behavior and energy over time. as though, it would become a bête noire, debate over human climate change by those and climate change deniers went on to age a very public and at times very personal attack against me. i was the lead author in the study, also my co-authors. it was all in the cynical hope that, you know, this idea among those looking to discredit the climate change that somehow a house of cards or understand that the problem could all rest on a single hockey stick and a 10-year-old study by me, when in fact it's much more like a puzzle since we been feeling in
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the piece is for two centuries and there's still some of urgency about certain aspects of the climate change problem in these missing pieces in the puzzle, but it's still thin enough that we can see the picture clearly in the pictures we are warming the planet and changing the climate to an creasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, primarily to fossil fuel burning and other human neck chickadees and there are literally dozens and dozens of independent lines of evidence for that conclusion. it doesn't hinge on any one study, anyone mind if evidence such as helio climate reconstruction of the sort we have performed. but it is the sort of cynical tactic and we have seen it in public relations campaigns, campaigns deployed by the tobacco industry to credit the case for the kiss between smoking cigarettes and adverse
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health effects and we sit with ozone depletion in an effort to make it seem like it's all based on one suspects that the and you can discredit a person, then the entire year case were concerned collapses, like i said, like a house of cards. they think it is not coincidental that the forces of anti-science and industry funded efforts to discredit environmental science are still going after rachel carson. they won't let her live peacefully in her grave because they believe if they can take down rachel carson, the entire environmental movement collapses like a house of cards. we found ourselves at the center of this raging debate we were subject to politically motivated attacks. james and off at senator from oklahoma attacked her work back
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in 2003 on the senate were during the very important debate over energy policy, climate policy. this time i was getting ready to start here at penn state, summer 2005 i was transcending from joe barton, nomar themis apology tbp overcook old oil spill. pathetic and, his claim to fame was that he was the republican chair of the house energy and commerce committee and he had decided to use a criticism that appeared on the op-ed pages of "the wall street journal" firework as a basis into our work, demanding every document, every e-mail, everything from our entire careers, with pieces by two more senior colleague stated that cap the century. and there was -- more recently
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there was an after, something you may have heard about the attorney general, 10 cushion only took a page and abused, many would say, his authority is attorney general to subject the university of virginia to a congressional -- three subpoena of some sort of set the state level, forcing them to turn all over at the time of the faculty member at university of virginia, 39 different scientists. it is pretty clear the motive was to try to find even more material that they could take out of context and make it use to train in various and claimed they had discredited the case for human caused climate change. fortunately very, you know, politicians of greek urge stepped up to defend us at critical times in some of you might be surprised to learn given the high-profile attacks
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by joe barton all came from one side of the political spectrum and the republican party. you might be surprised some of the great heroes in her story republicans as well. when we were attacked by general pardon, his fellow republican chair of the different committee. sure would alert, shared the house service committee came out and criticize his own fellow republican, joe barton and the harshest of terms, even in the public domain and came out stopping just short of calling out our for the modern game occurred the and another figure in the republican party you may remember john mccain also came out writing an editorial and the chronicle of higher education
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co-authored with the president of the university of arizona, blasting joe barton for the attempt to intimidate scientists whose findings might be inconvenient to the special interests that they represent. it just so happens by the way to james inhofe weiser has been and still is a single largest recipient in the u.s. senate of fossil fuel fund aid and joe barton is the single largest recipient in the house congress, house of representatives of fossil fuel fund them. some of the real heroes in her story were also republican. it wasn't that long but when this wasn't a political mission. some of those who have been looking to undermine the science, discredit the science to prevent us from having the good-faith debate about what to do with the problem and preempting a guy trying to assess the bad statement about whether the problem even exists
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is unfortunate that it does appear now to be a litmus test for one of the two parties. denial of climate change on the campaign trail and one of her former senators declared it's an elaborate hoax. and as a candidate for the nomination of his party for president. so it shouldn't be a politically partisan issue. i've got friends who who are republicans as well as democrats and i fully believe he cares much as my republican friends as their children and grandchildren as the democrats friends. and what this really is ultimately his initiative intergenerational ethics that we often frame climate change as a science problem away political policy problem or an economics
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problem, come across benefit analysis from having to work at the costs and benefits. to me it's fundamentally a problem and i have a six-year-old daughter in and the decisions we are making now, the decisions we make today about our energy policy and the emission we are producing today will have implications for decades and centuries down the road and we have to decide what sort of legacy we want to leave behind for our children and grandchildren. do we want to leave them as my colleague, james hansen at the goddard center for space studies has called it a different planet than we continue in the coors on their fossil fuel burning behavior, we will essentially be leaving a different planet, a planet that is fundamentally different than the one i grew up on, integrated planet for children and grandchildren. and so, i think that is where
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i'll leave it. i'm happy to open it up for questions now. >> anything. no holds barred. [inaudible] >> it seems that this research had all sorts of opportunities in different ways. why is that so difficult for people to see the opportunity? >> other countries are moving ahead in were falling behind. china is investing far more in energy the energy technology, solar to elegy than we are. so are many other countries. europe, india. we are falling behind in the rest of the world realizes that
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the future is going to be in transitioning away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. there's a limited supply of fossil fills me know if they are degrading the planet to our use of fossil fuels. the rest of the world gets it and i think many here in the u.s. get it, too. it's just that it hasn't quite -- it hasn't seen through to the highest level of decision-making and our political process. you know, i think that there is this false choice that you care, you know, if we try to move with fossil fuels were going to destroy the economy and the economy is built on fossil fuel and it simply isn't true. the rest of the world realizes the future of the economy is
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investing in new energy to elegy. if you are the one who establishes and creates those technologies, they'll have a huge marketplace with the rest of the world. moreover, what often is left out of the discussion when people talk about the cost of action is the cost of inaction, which is by every suspect, every credible assessment pc is far greater than the cost of action relatively as conservative economists have pointed out that uncertainty, sometimes hear from the critics that as long as there's uncertainty in science, we shouldn't. we might risk hurting the economy and we don't know. nothing else to demand the level of uncertainty that critics dealing with the climate change threat. where that is certain of this as we are anything in science, modern science and we know enough certainly to act.
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insurgency is economists point out it is likely not to win her favorite but against us. in the same way that we investing fire insurance for homes, not because we think our homes will burn down. nobody believes their house will burn down, but we have to hedge against a catastrophic low probability. climate change is the same thing. we know because of uncertainties and packs to be far greater than what we currently project and it's the extreme high cost. if relatively low probability with the economist to say that certainty is a reasonable. when you think of the full cost accounting, not just the cost of action, but the cost of inaction and growth opportunity for a move in the direction of the rest of the world, it seems like a no-brainer and unfortunately,
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there has been quite a bit of info in in the american political process by interest or quite understandably you don't want to see as shift in our behavior because they're profiting quite candidly with their addiction to fossil fuels and there are people, frankly who understandably feel threatened when people like me stand it. because we have to move away from fossil fuels. if you're a coal you're a coal miner, your livelihood was built on the industry, it can be threatening to hear we have to move away from this. it is important to realize that i don't think anybody here is talking about going cold turkey on fossil fuels. what we are talking about are shifting our behavior, introducing an incentive structure that incentivizes the new sources of energy that are degrading the claimant and does include some how, in some
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measure brings into the problem that caused a segregation tour environment of emitting fossil fuels. we need to internalize the cost of fossil fuels such as economic decision process so that it is built into the cost-benefit analysis, the fact that there is a cost of her time we made a ton of carbon in the hemisphere we are degrading our environment and there's a cost to renew to represent a can introduce in incentive structure that doesn't incentivize fossil fuels as we are currently still doing. it's upside down. so we just need to change that incentive structure in a productive way. but we can't just take only peoples jobs. we are currently relying on fossil fuels. and we've were some extent we have to start moving away from
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it. thanks. [inaudible] >> is a great question. you know, when you talk about -- when you think about what is necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration at levels through retail surgery reached a dangerous level of interference with climate, were not that far away. scientists have looked at the problem safely go above 450 parts per million of the hemisphere, we may commit ourselves to dangerous impacts on climate. right now we're at 390. were increasing two to three every year. so do the math. we wish for 50 pretty quickly we stand that trajectory. what that means is we have to make some pretty dramatic changes to avoid.
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enough the past two years i've been giving lectures on climate change and talking how we have to bring up the next two years and they keep on saying that. it's actually a few years later now that we have to bring emissions and rent them down substantially over the decades ahead for going to avoid crossing a dangerous threshold. when you do the math, once again and try to figure out how to make it there, how do we meet not just her growing energy demand in countries like china and india and south american countries and the rest of the world -- the developing world begins to develop their own infrastructure, how do we meet those green energies in a way that avoids reliance on fossil
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fuel energy. and find a way to get there. i have colleagues who i respect greatly who will tell you that there may be some difficult choices that we have to make. there said that alert posting may have to swallow in terms of the bridge technology we rely on to get to the point and there's all sorts of technology emerging now, whether it's solar, cell technology, fuel cell technology, even fusion. if you check to the pacifists, they say were pretty close to having viable where you get more energy than you put in the breakeven point. and we can see maybe 20 years -- 25 years down the road of being in a position where we can meet or energy from technologies, even wind. in a few decades there was a
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study just a few months ago who published by the journal was the suggested we could be 70% of our energies in a few decades, but it takes time to build up the infrastructure and move away from the current infrastructure and that does mean some difficult potential choices along the way as far as the bridge to where we need to be. so that is a very long-winded answer to your question. you know, maybe nuclear has to be on the table. if we start taking these things up and increasing the difficulty to see how we get there and meet the growing energy demands and the way that isn't where we don't continue with our reliance and increasing reliance on fossil fuels.
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[inaudible] >> what would you say that's a small proportion -- [inaudible] >> that's a great question. it's something we'd love to talk about. they're sending in a couple weeks ago in hawaii. out of that lease for a meeting. we were debating. the climatologists that work in all of the differing from the relatively short period of the past one and two of the call 12 dozen years since the end of the last ice age two or hundreds of thousands of years where we've seen i.c.e. ages come and go, back into the early geological. where we know that the two
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concentrations were almost certainly higher, substantially higher than today, even higher than where we can foresee them being in the next century and the globe is almost certainly warmer. there's no polar i.c.e. at that time. so you might say well, it was very put out a time, very warm. dinosaurs were roaming the polls. and it's true. we can certainly find the past but the globe was former and it's really not at at the time scale that the come in the in how the timescale compares to the timescale on which living things have been called upon to adapt. if you look, the early. 100 million years ago there's this natural changes that have to do with plate tectonics that gradually change the concentration of the atmosphere
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and time scales of tens of millions of years of natural processes that took the csu gradually. in the ground every time frame of 100 million years. while we are doing this on bering fossil fuels on the timescale that is bitterly a million times faster. and there is no evidence that life is ever had to adapt to changes of that magnitude on the timescale. so the worry and the example i like to use sometimes if we were at the end of the last ice ageñ and we were in last ice age inñ the same fossil fuel burning that we had free 200 yearñ period, would've raised two levels to a point where we woul have after preindustrialññ
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climate. we would get greenhouse says. greenhouse warming would've led to a climate like the claimantñ it existed before if we formedñ the planet.ññ so we would've ended up this great climate. that's where we want to be.ñ but if we coastal infrastructure by cities, relocated at thatñ time, it would have been evenñ more dramatic.ñ sea level rise would have beenñ even greater than it is todayñ because he was so much i surrounded even a modest amount of warming would've flooded the oceans and coastal regions by a greater amount.ñ it isn't the climate airheaded tories. estimated which are headedñññ there. but the fallacy of the nasaññ administrator and a presetñññ frustration, i heard him saying we talk about climate change, i arrogant of us to be talking that we don't know what climate
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is fast, so why are weññ complaining about? it is not the climate.ñ it is the rate of change of the climate and the capacity that w have that quickly.ññ that's the key issue. i suppose the hockey stickññ exxonmobil are now dozens ofñ reconstruction.ñ they'll come to the sameñ conclusion. so it's really the unprecedente rate that is taking place. any other questions? [inaudible]
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>> well coming in no, i would suspect the resources in the campaign which is bankrolled by the groups by the côte industries, the americans for press verities that rails again policies and curbing fossil fuels emissions fun by the côte industry. so there is this fast riverfront growth and even a media empire that they essentially have the force is of climate change denial at the warehouse available to them to try and discredit the science. and you know, you might ask, how
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is it that it took decades in the 1950s? how is it that it took decades to impact on that problem? it is anything but a well-funded information campaign can do to the public discourse. i am afraid just like you saw tobacco and we've seen out with the grain and the ozone depletion and the chemical influence of pesticides on environment and i can go on down the list. pharmaceutical products. in all of these areas where the findings of science come into common plate with powerful vested interest. it's not going to be a fair fight. fortunately, scientists scientists treat them aside and i do believe truth prevails again. sometimes it takes a few decades to get there. the cost of waiting decades to act on the problem, whether it's other people who die from
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smoking tobacco in the past half century are people who suffer from the climate changes and taken place somewhere already admitted to it is something frustrating it is to confuse and two different form than it is to educate. so it is a real challenge when as scientists we are committed to honesty and openness and we don't see things in absolutes. we see them as caveats and it's important to acknowledge research needs doing this. there are certain days that do exist. although we do know climate change is real and what the
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impacts are going to be as far as drought patterns in central pennsylvania two decades from now. they're still questions scientists are trying to answer. for real it is come to the other side is very same things in absolute and use the type exoteric dirt assassination scientist. it's been likened at times to fight between a boy scout and mysterious and we are the boy scouts. we have truth on our side, that there's some pretty nasty tactics being used to discredit them and it's unfortunate like to think were going to turn the corner on people this spring and this winter. people are starting to recognize they've got a choice. people are tying them it's an elaborate hoax or they can trust what they see with their own eyes when they look out the
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window. when i was down in d.c. last week and the cherry blossoms were record early bloom in the tidal basin. it was high 70s. before that i was in toronto wearing shorts and t-shirt and early marriage. some of that is why they are, but not all of it. it's unusually warm in the years that we've seen in the u.s. the answer is it's both. it's just not the random house, which is weather. the fact is that fixes are coming out more often now that one because it's loaded with climate change. people understand that they need. whether their partner, fishermen or hunter. people are seeing climate change before their eyes.
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it's so much longer than movement tuesday night will be viable. the worry is that we commit to devastating changes in the meantime if we don't act quickly enough. [inaudible] >> one of the criticisms, including the two of eyes -- [inaudible] there is a very interesting and very good book available and in fact is those people who are now leading the charge against climate funds used to be leading the charge against tobacco. these are the very same players who go car by car.
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>> picketing remunerated, where people think were in it for the grant money. or am i just graduate students and post-doctorate and allows us to work peer-reviewed literature. the money doesn't go out of our pockets. unfortunately the public -- there's enough of a lack of understanding of how science works but those looking to demagogue as they're able to distort the public's understanding of how science works and the reward structure sensitive than to agree with the other person. you agree with the elaborate. to access. the good ahead i prevent a person not, finding novel observation. that's how science moves forward
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. [inaudible] >> is a wonderful book and it really fills in the dots on what i was alluding to with this history here and have a climate change is part of a much longer-term of ongoing public-relations campaign by vested interests who are looking to discredit scientists. it looks like you another question. >> i was going to say, it seems like the united states is actually making a difference. -- [inaudible] >> why is the united states different click >> it's interesting because what she'd said i would've agreed with just a few years ago, but
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it's no longer true. by and large there's a lot of resistance to moving away from fossil fills. where nicole stayed. it's understandable. people in this state have made their livelihood for generations of coal and it's understandable that they're nervous about talk. i understand this year that were just going to take away their jobs. we can't do that. we have to transition and make sure that there's jobs available to replace the ones. they're such a history of fossils that reliance in our in australia unless our two countries where you've seen the greatest resistance. but over the past few years is essentially moved backward under stephen harper, the current prime minister they pulled out of the kyoto accord. so they've actually gone in the
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wrong direction you damage is not much in the right direction. they've actually gone backwards. i wish a step in canada a week ago in toronto talking to people that they are, talking to the media. it is amazing because they are saying there will be some five years ago in the u.s., where government scientists are no longer being allowed to talk to the media in canada if they were present climate research and they have to get approval to talk to media outlet. so their censorship of science taking place, which is an eerie correspondence with what was happening in the previous administration here, were at good friends at nasa who weren't allowed to type to the media about the research and climate and when calls came in to nasa
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or public relations, they would find scientists in the organization who had a contrarian review and climate change in the journalists in contact with them. it's happening in canada now. can you do as you appeal there is now dealing with the issue of the mining of the tarzan, which will be almost certainly distract due to their environment, but will also obviously out to our fossil fuel emissions. and what i am told has happened to many of the same players who were sort of fighting efforts to deal, to sign on to limit carbon emissions in the u.s. they now move north than they are actually deploying the same agenda in canada. and so unfortunately, were actually being the problems
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brad. in this case it's sort of spread across the border to the north. and what i can tell you is that there is -- i think there's something about us and the u.s. and australia. we have this rugged individualists that pervades our culture we don't like it when people tell us what to do. and so i think they gained some traction in the face to dealing with the problem tell people that hate, these scientists and people want to multipass carbon emissions limits are trying to take away your personal freedom. that has resonance, even though it argued that we submit the climate changes the team team if we stay in the course if we stand the course rerun will have if we stand the course rerun will have because we'll lose food and water resources. but the national security threats that arise because because we'll lose food and water resources. but the national security threats that arise because of climate change. the very real ways our freedom, liberty will be threat by the impact of climate change. but i think that argument is that resonates with people in the u.s. it's different in canada and
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it's interesting. the same tactics are being used with our neighbor to the north. they are meeting fierce resistance. when you talk to the indian people, their outreach to what has happened at what their prime minister is doing. i see no evidence that any popular accord for these actions. but they do have control so the government right now, so it would be interesting to see how that plays out in the next election. i know the people i have met. i literally haven't come across anyone -- maybe i'm not talking to the right people of course, but i couldn't find anybody who's happy with canada's current policy. so this is some units still unfolding. like i said, i hopefully if america continues to see the impact of the climate change now
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with folding with the very nice, they're going to hold their policymakers accountable for representing their interests and maybe we'll see a shift in the policies. we'll just have to wait to see how that plays out over the next few years. should we stop it there than? okay. thanks everybody. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> would like to hear from you. >> i'd like to thank barnes & noble for hosting a. we can talk about issues that i think are very important. there seems to be some confusion in the united states. a lot of people don't realize that america failed you did
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think it's still going on. just as i entered your, some guy said to me i didn't know america failed. i sent around. i also wanted just to locate this particular talk in terms of the stuff i've been writing. why america failed is the third in a trilogy. the first one was the twilight of american culture in the year 2000 picosecond limps called dark ages. six then this came out about a month ago, why america failed. there was however a collection of essays that i've published about a year ago that came between book due in book three. about half of the essays thereabout united states and that kind of want to encourage you to have a look at that.
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it's called the question of values. the reason it is important as there is material in there not in the good books. but it deals with the unconscious programming that americans have that leads them to do the things that they do, whether it's the person in the street with the president. unassertive completes the picture. so i just want to encourage you to have a look at that book. the title of this talk tonight is the way we live today. despite great pressure to conform in the united states to celebrate the united states is the best system in the world, the nation does not lack for critics. the last two decades have seen numerous works criticizing u.s. foreign policy, u.s. domestic policy in a particular economic policy. the american educational system, core system, military, media, corporate influence over military life and so on.
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most of this is astute and i've learned much from reading the studies, the two things in particular are lacking and have a very time making it into the public eye partly because americans are not trained to think in holistic fashion and the analysis in mind is too close to the bone is difficult for americans to hear it and somebody would say i didn't know. the first things these words lack is an integration of the fact there's that have done the country and. these are institution specific and the institution under examination exists in the kind of vacuum and could really be understood apart from other institutions. the second thing i find lacking is the relationship to the culture at large, the values and behaviors americans manifest on a daily basis. as a result they are
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superficial. they don't really go to the root of the problem in this avoidance enables them to be optimistic, which in fact be sometime in in the american mainstream. the authors often conclude the studies of practical recommendations as to how the particular institution they've identified can be rectified. they are a serious result. it's a chemical analysis of mechanical solutions. at the office were to realize these are not but are related to the other problems and are finally bridging the nature of american culture itself and its dna studies v. the prognosis would not be so rosy for it would be kind clear there is simply no way out and turning things around is not really an option at this point. to take just two examples, michael moore and noam chomsky admired him greatly they've done a lot to raise awareness in the united state, to show both
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foreign and domestic policy is currently pursued our worst, yet both of these men assume that the problem is coming from the top, from the pentagon and the corporations, which is partly true of course. the problem is this space on the theory of false consciousness that is the belief these institutions have pulled the wool over the i.c.e. at the average american citizen who is ultimately rational and well-intentioned. i would say to them, get out and talk to the people, find out how accurate that is. so what then, the solution is one of education. pull the wool over if an innocent citizenry will spontaneously weekend and commit itself to some sort of populist or democratic social vision. is that happening now with occupy wall street is an important question we should talk about it afterwards in q&a. my point is whether this turns out the rules was over the
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i.c.e. it% for mercedes-benz. here she is grateful for the corporations of consumer goods and the pentagon for protecting us for the awful air routes and the possible fundamental change appear to be quite small for what would be called aside as different institutions in the very of culture. personally i doubt there's much chance of that. america is after all it. >> watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..

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